A Practical Approach to Modeling Doubly Curved Conformal Microstrip Antennas

Abstract

Designers are increasingly integrating conformal microstrip antennas into the curved structures of either air or land vehicles. Quite often, these structures are doubly curved (e.g. curved along two orthogonal surface directions). This practice necessitates the development of accurate codes versatile enough to model conformal antennas with arbitrarily shaped apertures radiating from doubly curved surfaces. Traditional planar-structure-based design techniques are not well suited for this application. A hybrid finite element-boundary integral formulation appropriate for the high-frequency analysis and design of doubly curved conformal antennas is introduced in this paper. The novelty of this approach lies in its use of an asymptotic prolate spheroidal dyadic Green’s function to model the physics of curved surface diffraction. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, the effects of curvature on the resonant frequency and input impedance of both a doubly curved conformal square and circular patch antenna are investigated. Different feed positions are also considered. Due to a paucity of published experimental data, the numerical results are benchmarked by comparison with the results for planar square and circular patch antennas. The planar results are obtained by using an experimentally validated planar finite element-boundary integral code. 296 Macon, Trott, and Kempel